In this research that people propose to undergo, we are looking to research the indirect marriage between your love of money, attitude towards unethical behaviour and propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB) among post graduate management students in India. We intend to test a theoretical model to ascertain the causal website link between these parameters. Attitude towards unethical behaviour may provide as a mediator of the partnership between your love of money and the PUB helping us better understand the intricate relation. However, it is not yet known if love of money causes attitude towards unethical behaviour or it is the other way around. More specifically, in this study, we explore the indirect relationship
(The Love of Money Ж Frame of mind towards unethical behavior Ж Unethical Behaviour ) and the moderating variables being the gender of the respondents. After ethics training, feminine students change and improve moral behaviour, but male students do not (Ritter, 2006). Based on these ideas, we attempt to look at the possible variations between male and female students using the same model. PUB has been measured using a 15-item Unethical Behaviour measure with five Factors: Misuse Resources, Not Whistle Blowing, Theft, Corruption, and Deception.
We develop our theory from a little set of research ideas shown below-
It is well known that management education isn't just a highly commercialised business (more than other types of education statements Economist, 2004). these days but is a high stakes affair considering that many of the top CEOs of the world are products of business universities. In a standing done in 'Why Do MBAs Make Better CEOs?' by Herminia Ibarra, Morten T. Hansen, and Urs Peyer, CEOs with an MBA placed on average a full 40 places higher than those without. Indeed, half the most notable 10 visited B-school (although, admittedly, one of these fallen out before getting an MBA). Because of increasing set of scandals and other corruptions( Enron, Arthur Anderson LLP, Tyco, Satyam and Bernie Madoff) the lack of business ethics and requirements is a proper discussed topic, especially in the press.
The Satyam scandal boosts serious questions about the MBA culture and business management education. It is significant that the controversial 3rd party director on the table of Satyam Computer Services, N. Mohan Rao, was the dean of the visible Indian Institution of Business in Hyderabad. "Business schools are also blamed for the existing world financial crisis. The universities value leaders'charisma over element and uncritically embrace free market and profiteering" (Business Week)
Many students type in business schools due to their love of money (Cunningham et al. , 2004; Tang et al. , 2006, 2007) and maintain these values over time (Staw, Bell, Clausen, 1986). Years later, business students become business managers and executives. " The disgraced chairman of Satyam, Ramalingam raju, too has an MBA from Ohio and has done a course in the Harvard Business Institution. How is it that people with such elite education are involved in such unethical conduct? One reason is that management education has little concern with ethics. The Harvard Business College, the most renowned of these all, is itself now under rigorous scrutiny (What they Teach You at Harvard-My Two Years in the Cauldron of Capitalism, Philip Broughton)
It is important to instil a value of ethics and trust at the b-school level which will help appreciate you can adhere to ethics whilst chasing your love of money. When greed gets control you will notice that the first casualty are your ethics and integrity
Researchers through the years have tried to recognize the causes of these unethical behaviours and scandals. Matching to some researchers, one of the real root causes of this ethics problems is ''the bottom-line-mentality'' (Sims, 1992, p. 508) or ''increasing shareholder value'' (Kochan, 2002, p. 139). Profit-based mechanisms create pressure (to increase revenue) and opportunity (to earn perverse bonuses) and may involve some serious flaws.
Recent research facilitates the notion that ''the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil'' (http://www. biblegateway. com, 1 Timothy, 6:10, New International Version), but money (income) is not (Tang and Chiu, 2003; Tang et al. , 2007; Vitell et al. , 2006).
''People who want to get rich get into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and damaging needs that plunge men into mess up and destruction. For the love of money is a reason behind all sorts of evil'' (the Bible: 1 Timothy, 6: 9-10).
There is a dearth of empirical research concerning the love of money and wicked because many lay down people and researchers may think about this concern as a taboo, a religious/ controversial issue, not a clinical/academic issue, and to be too much value-laden, in so doing, may have shown great reluctance to study this taboo(e. g. , Vardi and Weitz, 2004; Vardi and Wiener, 1996). In so doing, the build of unethical behaviour can be an under-represented part of research in the management field and deserves further attention. Hence we take up the research, assert that the love of money is positively related to the propensity to engage in unethical behaviour (PUB).
LITERATURE REVIEW
Love of money, moral attitude and propensity to act unethically has been extensively discussed in a number of research journals.
Love of Money
From time unknown, it's been recognized to the human being knowledge that money is one of the most important factors affecting the attitude as well as behaviour of people. Money finds mention in Bible as well ("Money is the root of all evil"). For the present research, the following definition of love of money has been taken - love of money is "one's attitude towards money with affective, behavioural and cognitive components; this is one features to money; one's desire to have, value of, expectation about, or aspiration for the money; not one's need, greed or materialism; a multi-dimensional specific difference variable; another order latent construct with several first order latent sub-constructs"(Tang et al, 2007, Legislation et al, 1998).
The first major try to establish a level capturing this is of money was made by Thomas Li-Ping Tang (1992). The amount of money ethics originated because of this which captured six factors like "money as related to different needs, positive or bad attitude towards money, the management or control of money and obsession and power". The love of money which measures one's desire and aspiration to get money is a subset of the money ethics scale. The love of money range was first produced by Tang et al (2002, 2003) that measured the build on four different components viz Motivator, Success, Importance and High. It measures how much a specific individual is motivated by money, to what extent it symbolizes success to him, how important money is to him and his want to have more money. Later, an abridged version of the love of money range was utilized by Tang et al (2007) where only the sub-constructs High, Motivator and Importance were considered. This specific range has been used for the intended purpose of this research as well. The amount of money ethics scale as well as the love of money level have been tested and validated across lots of studies disperse across different continents (Tang et al, 2007).
Prior to the 1980s, the relationship of money with other factors was not analyzed significantly (Furnhaf, 1984). However, there's been a whole lot of study recently which has tried out to capture how love of money interacts with other factors. One impressive theme has been that the relationship of money with unethical behaviours has been explored to a great level in the recent books. Tang (2007) reviewed the relationship between the income levels and the quality of life using love of money along with gender, marital status and job satisfaction as control parameters. The research confirmed a few very interesting results. However, the one highly relevant to this research is the one wherein love of money is adversely related to job satisfaction, income is adversely related to the grade of life. This implies that love of money works as an important changing in mediating the partnership between income and quality of life. Other similar studies establish love of money as important varying impacting consumer behavior, subjective well-being and pay satisfaction. The impact of love of money on other constructs like pay satisfaction, determination, work ethic and commitment has been evaluated by Tang et al (2000, 2006, 2007) and Hong Meng Wong (2008) with focus on groups propagate across geographies and professions. The result shows that love of money does have significant effect on many of these constructs.
Unethical Behaviour
The field of ethics and unethical behaviour are extremely broad and sizeable research has been done in them. Ethics is the typical a person places while judging what's right or incorrect. Quite simply, ethics is something very personal and varies over the population. Ethics as a part of viewpoint has been broadly studied from the times of Socrates, Aristotle to its present post-modern form. Whenever a person judges some behavior as incorrect according to his/her honest benchmarks, he perceives exactly like unethical behaviour. Attitude towards unethical behavior is thus defined as if the person considers a particular set of behavior as honest or not. The propensity to activate in unethical behaviour, on the other hands, is thought as how likely the individual will engage in behaviour that he perceives as unethical.
The components of unethical behaviour have variously been defined by different authors. Since this paper attempts to check out unethical behaviour within organizations and the ones which are motivated by love of money, white collar offences have only been considered. Ivancevich et al (2003) attemped to define a white collar criminal offense and used constructs like fraud, cyber loafing, office deviance, counterproductive behavior, problem and organizational misbehaviour. Each one of these constructs may include many other sub-constructs. Organizational misbehaviour, for example, contains at least 23 different ones like "arson, blackmail, bribery, bullying, cheating, discrimination, dishonesty, espionage, fraudulence, incivility, intimidation, kickbacks, lying down, misinformation, personal privacy violation, revenge, sabotage, erotic harassment, drug abuse, thefts, threats, whistle blowing and withholding information". However, for the purpose of this research, only those factors that are related to the financial scandals are inspired by love of money are taken into account. The five sub-constructs that contain been used to establish unethical behaviour include Abuse Resources, Theft, Problem, Deception rather than Whistle Blowing (Tang, 2004). These factors have been defined in some depth here:
Factor Maltreatment Resources
This factor actions the level to which the worker is using office resources like Xerox, stamp, telephone and internet for their own personal profit alternatively than for the company's. The usage of internet for personal purposes is also called cyber loafing and is becoming a location of great matter in current organizations.
Factor Theft
Theft is common in companies, administration offices, schools, schools and medical nursing homes. Very often, employees take things from office and use them because of their own consumption. It has been identified as one of the menaces plaguing many commercial and other establishments. The factor fraud has been measured by the employee's trend to grab goods, merchandise and cash from the office. It may involve borrowing cash from the counter-top without asking, taking merchandise home or gifting it to friends.
Factor Corruption
Corruption is the illegitimate exchange of resources done by gatherings who have little or no say to them for furthering their own benefits. The Transparency International comes out with annual procedures of the corruption perception index which ranks the many countries according to the perceived level of public sector problem in them. While comparatively profitable countries with high criteria of living like those in the Pacific and Scandinavia rank highly, India has an abysmal position of 84 and a composite rating of 3. 4/10. This is merely among the many studies that point out a high degree of corruption within the Indian system. Problem in the organization sector may take many varieties like falsifying the accounts of the business and fooling stakeholders (as done regarding Satyam), abusing one's position in the organization to receive gifts, money and other benefits and playing with the passions of sub-ordinates to improve the bottom-line of the business and hence get an increased bonus.
Factor Deception
Deception or fraud is the take action of intentionally misleading people through the inaccurate representation of facts. The contemporary society as a whole has seen a rise in the amount of instances of deceptions or frauds and the same has been mirrored in the organization sector as well. It isn't very unusual to encounter sales people or real estate agents making false claims for making one extra deal and company advertising vastly exaggerating product features to lure customers. Also, often customers are charged more than the genuine price, costed more secretly after being guaranteed discounts or real benefits are covered from them in order that they cannot avail of these.
The existing books mainly handles the various areas of unethical behaviour and the endeavors to establish the partnership with other factors are comparatively less in amount. . However, the rise of commercial scandals in recent past has led to few interesting studies on understanding the motorists of unethical behaviour. Cohen et al (1996) and McCarthy (1997) try to measure ethical orientation among Canadian students and collegiate accounting students respectively. Mackewn et al (2008) recognized reasoning skills and philosophical orientation as factors affecting the moral judgement of students at an US university. Douglas et al (2001) examined the impact of the effect of organizational culture and honest orientation on accountants' honest judgements and found significant marriage. Allmon et al (2000) observes that of the many demographic variables, only era and religious orientation have significant impact on ethical orientation. Tang et al(2007) found that love of money possessed impact on propensity to act unethically through the mediating variable of Machiavellianism. Tang et al(2006) again reviewed the relationship between attitude towards unethical behaviour and propensity to react unethically among business school students in USA and discovered that the former resulted in the second option.
The level for measuring unethical behavior in organizations was initially produced by Tang and Chiu (2003). It had been a 15-item-4-factor size having the items Mistreatment Resources, Theft, Problem rather than Whistle Blowing. Later, another factor was added to the scale by means of deception and the range was broadened to a 32 items one (Luna-Arocas and Tang, 2004). Chen and Tang (2006), however, shortened this range to a 15-item-4-factor one for their paper and this has been used for the intended purpose of this research as well.
Formulation of Hypothesis
Love of Money and Propensity to Act Unethically
The relationship between love of money and unethical behaviour has been investigated upon in a number of journals. Tang and Chen (2007) examined the partnership between love of money and the propensity to react unethically with Machiavellianism as the mediator and school major (business and psychology) and gender as the moderator parameters. The results suggested that the partnership hold best for the whole sample, for male students but not for female students, for business students however, not for psychology students and for man business students however, not for feminine business students. Other studies which probed this romance were Hong Meng Wong (2008) for Malaysian Evangelical Christians and Tang and Chiu (2003) for Hong Kong employees, both of which showed significant marriage.
Apart from the support in books, it is intuitively easy to comprehend the partnership between love of money and unethical behaviour. From the traditional times, money is considered one of the main drivers of all types of unethical behaviours. The bigger the love of money of a person, the more is his desire and aspiration so you can get money and the much more likely he is to focus on the end to getting money than the means of getting the same. When the best objective of someone's actions is very highly respected by him, he is very often happy to forego the mental pain that is brought on by acting in a manner that is against his personal values. That explains why a person with greater love of money will be ready to do something against his own honest beliefs. Oddly enough enough, the partnership was already validated in places like USA and Hong Kong where people are relatively affluent and money should not be a big driver for unethical behaviours. Thus the partnership is expected to be only better in case of India since in a comparatively poorer country, love of money ought to be the major reason why a person would like to react unethically. Hence, we hypothesize that
H1: Love of money is favorably related to propensity for unethical behaviour.
Attitude towards Unethical Behaviour and Propensity to React Unethically
The romance between both of these variables can be described with the aid of the idea of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980). This theory tries to find describe the build of behavioural goal with the help of two other constructs, specifically the attitude and subjective norm. Behavioural intent is defined as the effectiveness of intention of an individual to act in a particular way. Attitude is what he perceives to be possible repercussions of his behaviour and exactly how he values those perceived repercussions. Subjective norm, on the other side, is the recognized expectation of others so far as his behaviour can be involved and how far he intends to comply with those expectations. Relating to this theory, the behavioural objective of one is the amount of his frame of mind towards that behaviour and subjective norm weighted in various proportions with respect to the person and the situation. In other words, the behavior of a person can be expected by his attitude towards that one behaviour and what he thinks of other's reactions if he behaves in that way. Thus attitude takes on an important role in deciding how a person will eventually behave.
Intuitively speaking, any manifestation of behavior is a direct outcome of the frame of mind of the person towards that behaviour. In case a person considers doing something is wrong and still proceeds to do it, it generates cognitive dissonance. The individual tries to come out of this level either by changing his actions or changing his values. So the attitude towards unethical behavior should have a positive relation with the propensity to react unethically. However, the relation may be weaker in India than in USA because in a less developed country with limited resources and increased competition, people might be tempted to indulge in a task they consider is unethical to be able to further their profits. Thus, the effect of cognitive dissonance is likely to be less pronounced for a person in a expanding country than in a developed country, but it continues to be expected to be there. Hence we hypothesize that
H2: Frame of mind towards unethical behavior is positively related to propensity for unethical behavior.
Love of money and frame of mind towards unethical behaviour
Love of money and frame of mind towards unethical behavior never have been examined much in the prevailing literature. Most of the research can be involved with the partnership of either of the variables with the propensity to respond unethically. Hong Meng Wong (2007) examined the money account of Malaysian Evangelical Christians and tried out to map them with their ethical attitudes. Consequently, they were categorised as successful money achiever, careful money director and money apathetic individuals. The study indicated that the three different groups had significant dissimilarities in their frame of mind towards unethical behaviour. The first group was much more likely to view activities as ethical in comparison to others.
Compared to the partnership between love of money and propensity for unethical behavior, it is much more challenging to hypothesize the relationship between love of money and attitude towards unethical behaviour. It is true that a person with a higher love of money is expected to have a different ethical frame of mind i. e. if he perceives a specific action to be moral or not. A person with an increased love of money is more likely to engage in unethical behaviour and to get away the cognitive dissonance, he is more likely to justify exactly like ethical behaviour. On the other hand, a person with lower love of money will probably have a stronger moral code. Viewed in another way, love of money changes a person's attitude towards unethical behaviour and can lead him to activate in unethical behavior. Hence, we hypothesize that
H3: Love of money is favorably related to attitude towards unethical behavior.
Gender and Love of Money, Attitude towards Unethical Behavior and Propensity to Behave Unethically
Studies have suggested that males and females have an alternative frame of mind towards what constitutes unethical behavior. A large part of this can be explained by the gender socialization theory. Socialization is the procedure where a person will inculcate his/ her norms, traditions and ideologies. Gender socialization theory shows that women and men have a tendency to learn different kinds of principles and norms in keeping with their identified role in the society. There were three different theories proposed to make clear gender socialization. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory shows that gender differences enter into existence when children view their genitals. Community learning theory uses positive encouragement women and men acquire when they display their expected behaviour to clarify the gender socialization. Cognitive development theory proposes that men and women try to react differently according to their stereotypes to be able to better understand the world around them and distinguish themselves from each other.
The occupational socialization theory, on the other hands, suggests that people in the same occupation tend to respond in a particular common way in order to better adapt to the needs of these jobs. Thus for the purpose of this research, the gender and occupational socialization theories hold contrasting predictions about the impact of gender on constructs like love of money, frame of mind towards unethical behavior and the propensity to react unethically. While according to the former, gender should have an impact, the latter suggests that because the respondents all belong to the same occupation (business university students in India), occupational socialization should prevail and the role of gender should be nullified.
Mason and Mudrack (1996) tried to handle this dichotomy by examining the worthiness and ethical systems in full and part time employees, both male and feminine. The gender socialization theory shows that there is certainly gender difference in ethics variables regardless of the employment status. The occupational socialization hypothesizes gender similarity on a single variables. The analysis showed some interesting findings. While there is no significant gender differences partly time employees, the honest differences between women and men was significant for full time employees and women were found to become more ethical in character. . This led the authors to claim that the segregation of men and women within the work force has resulted in the development of different ethical behaviour in the two groups and men generally tend to be unethical compared to females. . The identical type of thought leads us to dispute that guys will have significantly more love of money in comparison to females. Studies have also indicated that men are more motivated by performance and competition than thoughts and empathy when compared with females (Chen and Tang, 2006). More love of profit males can make clear this occurrence. Hence we hypothesize that
H4: There is a positive relationship between gender (male) and love of money
H5: There's a positive relationship between gender (man) and attitude to unethical behaviour
H6: There may be positive correlation between gender (male) and the propensity to act unethically
On the foundation of the aforementioned discussions, the next model has been suggested:
Attitude towards Unethical Behaviour
Propensity for Unethical Behaviour
Gender
Some of the extraneous variables that may have impacted the results were the sort of education and the age of the respondents. Both these results have been eradicated by restricting the test to respondents from business institutions. Another varying that was examined in the American framework was the income of the respondents since most business academic institutions students there have in your free time job and are self-sustaining. Even after this, there is no significant marriage noticed between income and the other variables. Since business schools students in India do not will often have any income source, this factor is not taken into consideration.
Research Methodology
Sample
The sample preferred for this study contains only business classes students in India. Appropriately, an online questionnaire was floated and the link was delivered to selected respondents running a business schools all over the country. In the ultimate analysis, 270 replies were collected which only 262 have been considered. Attention was taken up to make the survey completely anonymous in dynamics since it has been observed that people aren't very forthcoming while talking about their ethical preferences in public areas. (Chen and Teng, 2006)
Measures
All the constructs have been assessed by by using a five point Likert Scale. For measuring the love of money, the abridged love of money level was used (Chen and Tang, 2007). It really is a 9-item-3-factor Likert scale. The dimension and efficient equivalence of this level have been greatly founded and cited in a variety of studies across various countries and languages. Unethical behaviour has been assessed by using a 15-item-5-factor range (Cheng and Tang, 2006). This range also offers good dependability, face validity, content validity and way of measuring invariance data. The scale has been used to measure both the frame of mind towards unethical behavior and propensity to react unethically. While calculating the former, the respondents have been asked to rate this items on a level of very unethical to very honest. In case of the second option, the respondents have been asked how likely they'll take part in the behaviour as mentioned in these things. To reduce priming results, the way of measuring of propensity to respond unethically has been done prior to the attitude towards unethical behaviour (Chen and Tang, 2007).
